SLAUGHTER AND BUTCHERY

All farmers considering selling their meat direct to the public or through short supply chains will need to think about who is going to slaughter and butcher their stock, where this will happen, and what your customers criteria for slaughter and butchery are.

Slaughter and butchery regulations are particularly complex, and the food safety implications of errors are high. Therefore producers must take special care to ensure all regulations are met.

Other than exceptions for slaughter of poultry and lagomorphs (rabbits, hares and edible rodents) and on-farm cutting rooms, which are explained below, slaughter and butchery must be done at a Food Standards Agency (FSA) approved premises by trained and certified staff.

As a result, slaughterhouses are an essential part of the infrastructure necessary to support high welfare local food systems. The closure of many smaller slaughterhouses in recent years has had negative implications for producers, who now often have little option but to transport livestock further afield.

Options for Slaughter and Butchery
Other than setting up an approved slaughterhouse on your farm, or making use of the exemption for poultry and lagomorphs, you have no option but to use an approved abattoir for slaughter.

For butchery, you have three main options: 1. Many abattoirs or cutting plants are happy to hang, cut and process meat for a fee. 2. If a high street butcher cuts up an animal for a farmer, the farmer cannot then sell it on. However, if there isn’t a licenced cutting room anywhere near you (or there is but they won’t take your meat) the local authority may sometimes make an exception - but don’t assume that’s the case. Alternatively, you may be able to establish the meat supply and sale as a co-operative or partnership venture with the butcher. 3. Alternatively you can set up an on-farm facility or rent one on another farm, and either do the butchery yourself, or hire a butcher to do the cutting to your specifications. The main benefit of doing the processing yourself is that you can have more control over the quality and specifications of the cutting. However, it involves skill, time, equipment and storage costs, and compliance with regulations.

Finding abattoirs and cutting rooms
The FSA produce a list of approved food processing plants, which includes slaughterhouses and cutting plants.

If you are an organic certified farmer and you want to continue organic certification through to sales then you will need a certified abattoir. The Soil Association produces a map of organically certified abattoirs, and Organic Farmers and Growers have a more comprehensive, though somewhat out of date, list.

If you want to sell Halal or Kosher meat, you will need to find a slaughterhouse that provides these services. Unfortunately there is currently no list of which slaughter houses can offer Halal or Kosher slaughter, so you will have to speak to abattoirs in your area.

In any case it’s worth shopping around and listening to what's on the grape vine about local abattoirs. Go and visit and ask to look around.

A good abattoir will be happy to show you around while slaughtering is in process and will show you the range of services on offer. Some abattoirs offer a cutting and packing service and you need to check the quality of the cutting and packing and also the labelling.

On-farm cutting rooms
On-farm cutting rooms that supply on a ‘marginal, localised and restricted’ basis are exempt from approval by the FSA but may still need to be approved by the local authority.

In UK law, marginal means either up to 25% of the business turnover or weight of food products, or up to 2 tons per week (this can be averaged over a year, but does not include wild game meat). Localised means the meat is supplied within the supplying establishment’s own county plus the greater of either the neighbouring county or counties or 50 km/30 miles from the boundary of the supplying establishment’s county. Restricted means the business has a retail outlet supplying the final consumer with part of its production of meat.

For more information see: Operational policy for the approval of food establishments undertaken by the Food Standards Agency

Small-scale poultry and lagomorph slaughter
Producers intending to undertake small-scale on-farm slaughter of poultry or lagomorphs must be registered with the local authority, have a certificate of competence for slaughter and comply with food hygiene and labelling regulations.

Small is interpreted as (i) under 10,000 birds or lagomorphs per year; or (ii) producers annually slaughtering over 10,000 birds or lagomorphs who are members of an appropriate assurance scheme and who either (a) dry pluck by hand or (b) slaughter for 40 days per year or less. Localised means the meat is supplied within the supplying establishment’s own county plus the greater of either the neighbouring county or counties or 50 km/30 miles from the boundary of the supplying establishment’s county, and additionally anywhere within the UK in the two weeks preceding Christmas or Easter, and for geese, Michaelmas (late September).

For more information see: Operational policy for the approval of food establishments undertaken by the Food Standards Agency